[mistrial9]

yes - I worked in a computer-aided chemistry company as software engineer in California in the 90s. The culture there was from the 80s, but the scientists were very hard working! (scientists may not write very good code but you know, they can write a lot of it! athlete/scientist was common in my group). I was making pretty good money and my father wanted to see where I worked once. So I used my badge to walk in with the two of us, to a ~10 meter x 16 meter open room, with about four glass walled offices on one side and the rest of the area with cubicles.. maybe two dozen or more.. some of the cubicles were "big" with a table, some medium, and then a number of ordinary ones. I was used to it, but as a male, I could see over the cube walls while walking, whereas shorter colleagues could not. Other small things about it at another time.. (some offices at Apple Inc, Cupertino were also laid out like that -- maybe they got it from their HP-imported managers).

My father was silently aghast.. he was actually startled by seeing everyone in the room like that.. all the commotion. It had never occured to him that people could be arranged like a lab rat-maze (which it was really).